‘Love Is Blind’ EP Reveals How “Comfortable,” “Intimate” Pod Design Leads to Love

Love Is Blind sure has contributed a lot to pop culture in the four years since its debut. The reality romance series took Netflix’s unscripted content to a new level, giving us some of the realest fights and best villains in the streamer’s library. Every delivers viral moments, like those infamous fake tears, and twists that keep the internet guessing.

The show’s biggest innovation has to be its premise, which takes blind dating to the extreme by having singles date and fall in love with a relative stranger, sight unseen. This personality-exclusive dating setup is accomplished via the pods, essentially IKEA setups with a mystical, crystalline blue portal on one wall. On the other side of said portal sits the single’s potential soulmate.

Debuting just over four years ago in the weeks before the pandemic sequestered everyone across the globe, Love Is Blind was the right show at the right time. Remember the D.I.Y. Instagram parody Love Is Quarantine? The pods hit a nerve, and they remain at the epicenter of the Love Is Blind phenomenon to this day. The show’s single most enduring catchphrase even puts the premise at the forefront. Now the phrase “the pods are now open” has real cultural cache, having previously been something that I guess only pea farmers heard with regularity.

With Love Is Blind Season 6 entering the back half of its run, we wanted to return to dip back into the pods — metaphorically flip the lights on and take a mental tour with none other than series creator and executive producer Chris Coelen. After all, there are still plenty of mysteries surrounding the pods — like how they’re arranged, if they have different settings for coziness, and if the hopeless romantics sleep within walking distance of their octagonal love dens. Coelen, who included designs for the pods in his original pitch to Netflix, was game to answer all of our questions about the most iconic — and surprisingly romantic — locale in all of Netflix reality TV history. Yes, we even get to the bottom of that mystical, crystalline portal and how it found its way onto a reality romance show. The interview is now open!

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Decider: Comparing the pods from Season 1 to the pods in Season 6, it’s surprising that so little has really changed. When you first pitched Love Is Blind over four years ago, did you think you’d nailed the pod design?

Chris Coelen: The intention was to design a space — which became the pods — where people could connect in a really comfortable, intimate way, where they could be themselves and really hunker down. I feel like it works. It’s comfortable and cozy and they can move around. They can get comfortable. They can really be themselves. There are little tweaks that have changed. We’ve changed the lighting slightly, here and there.

You’ve added furniture, like side tables.

But for all intents and purposes you’re absolutely right. It’s very it’s very similar.

One question that I’ve always had about the pods: are the participants actually on opposite sides of the wall from each other? We often see that overhead shot showing the singles across from each other, but they really could be in any pod.

They’re really there. That’s really what it looks like. They are really on the other end. That’s always been the intention, that moving wall. I remember thinking [in the design phase], “It should be something where you can kind of see the shadow, or distorted shadow, behind the wall. Would that be cool?” And then we felt like, no, that might give too much away in terms of size, shape, motion, or whatever. But you want to feel like there’s a living, warm thing being a person over on the other side. So the wall is directly in the direction of where the other person is, and they’re looking basically at a mirror image of that on the other side. And there are speakers that are alongside the moving wall, so the sound is coming from out there. They’re not fully soundproof, the pods. So if somebody screamed, you can hear them in a muffled way. But if you’re just talking in a normal voice, you can’t hear anything.

I always describe the pods as an IKEA setup, but with a mystical, crystalline portal on one wall. It almost feels like a sci-fi concept. How did you settle on using that glowing portal to convey that there’s a living person on the other side of the set’s wall?

It was in the pitch that I made to Netflix, and the renderings in that original pitch were very similar to exactly what you see on the show today. It was more a ball of some kind of shape, and it’s evolved — with the help of our set designer and lighting people — into what it is. We tried a couple of different things and a couple different colors, and it could move this way or that way or whatever, but the idea of movement, and something that felt sort of alive, was always the intention. 

Now that you’re six seasons in, close to 200 people have dated via the pods. Has anyone ever made special requests for the pods, like making it brighter or dimmer or hotter or colder so that they can feel the most at ease?

No, actually. It’s so funny that you bring that up. Nobody’s actually ever requested a modification in the pods, so that’s interesting.

The pods also host all the activities that would happen on dates in the outside world. In the earlier seasons, the dates seemed more conversation driven. Now it seems like there are more theme nights, like with games or special meals. When did that evolution come about?

We’ve actually done exactly the same thing in every season. We’ve always had a day where we put games in, and we’ve always told them to think of the dates as real dating in the outside world. And if they have ideas, like, “Let’s play mini golf” or whatever, you can do anything you do on a real date — except see each other and touch each other. But you can order in Chinese food. We encourage them to think of those things, and sometimes they make it on the show and sometimes they don’t. They spend so much time in the pods together that we pick out moments that you think reflect the essence of their experience. There’s only so much time you have on the show to convey that.

In Season 1, they had putt-putt golf and mini hoops and stuff like that. They also give each other gifts. Like Lauren and Cameron’s dates in Season 1, you’ll see weirdly that there’s a tree behind one of them, because one of them gave the other a gift of a tree that had grown in the parents’ yard. There’s things that happen that we just don’t have time to get to. But it’s really fun to watch them think about what they might do, what they might plan.

The one thing that we changed, and it’s really more of an evolution, but for a while we’ve had what is called silent disco. You can you can put on headphones and they have a playlist and you can play this music. It can be very bonding for people, what music they like. We’ve never really shown too much of that on the show, but we really enjoy it. And we originally had it in just one day and because people liked it so much, we’ve actually expanded out to have it across three days, if they want to access it.

Whereas the pods have stayed more or less the same, the lounge areas have gotten more colorful, more elaborate. 

They try to do little upgrades every season. They add little touches and they try to put fun games in there, Connect Four or cornhole or checkers or chess. They’ve got a gym in there and sometimes people are surprised when they come in, they’re like, “Wait, the treadmill actually works?” And it does. And we’ve got the yoga mats. So we tried to put stuff in there that they can have fun with.

That leads me to another big question: where do they sleep? Do they sleep on the soundstage? Or are y’all shuttling them in from a hotel at 6 a.m. so they can prepare breakfast in the lounge’s kitchen? 

Originally the intention was that they were going to sleep in the facility with the pods. Season 1 we were in Pinewood [in Atlanta] and it’s a massive, massive, massive stage. We were on the biggest stage at Pinewood. They were filming The Avengers at the same time we were filming. We were on the bigger stage. It’s just gigantic, like 60,0000 square feet of facility. We thought in Season 1 we also wanted to have their sleeping quarters here, at the pods. So in Season 1, the intention was that we would have those built out and we were running behind on construction. We were desperately trying to finish the sleeping quarters by the end of the night, but we couldn’t get it done. So our production team brought in these sleeper vans, these big trucks with cots in them, and we had the participants sleep there on the first night. And on day two in the morning, one or two people were like, “This isn’t comfortable.” One person was like, “I saw a cockroach.” And, so I said, “We’re gonna get rid of these” and we were like, alright, they don’t need to sleep here. We got them all their own private individual hotel rooms, because it’s not really relevant where they sleep. The men and women have different hotels. During the day, whenever they want to go back to their hotel room, they can, and have a warm shower or a warm bed and sleep in their own room. That’s what we’ve done since day two in Season 1.

I have to ask about the gold goblets that have become almost the Love is Blind mascot. When was that decision made? Are you surprised that it’s taken on a life of its own?

I was surprised that it got as much attention as it did. It was a very intentional decision and we’ve extended that theme to the other shows that we do in Netflix. We have silver goblets on The Ultimatum. We have white goblets on Perfect Match. The idea is that Love is Blind has very distinct sections of the show: you’re in the pods, you’re on a romantic getaway, you’re out in the real world, you’re at the weddings. It felt like the gold goblets were something that would be there throughout all of that, that made [people say], “Oh, you’re watching Love is Blind.” That was the original reason to do it.

Everyone has speculation about it. Having been producing in the non-scripted space for a really long time, I love that people have their theories about why this and why that. Some people are like, “Oh, it’s for editing” — and it’s actually not editing. If it was for editing, we would do that on all of our shows. Like Married at First Sight, a show that we’ve done for a long time, we don’t have any distinctive glassware because that show has a different feel in terms of the way we film it, the look of it. It’s all out in the world. On Love Is Blind, you’re starting in a very — you talked about it being sci-fi, or some people have said it’s Black Mirror-ish or whatever. It’s a very heightened and otherworldly kind of place, even though it’s very much of our world. And because of the fact that you have some of these heightened touches, that people live very real lives within, to me the idea of injecting a visual identifier was a really fun, cool way to unify everything. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. New episodes of Love Is Blind Season 6 premiere on Wednesdays on Netflix.